From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 5:38 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: trip27
Friday
There are a lot of things I don’t know. Here’s one of them. Wait! Here is something I do know first. The Bounder has two furnaces. At least one of them blows heat into the storage compartments below, to keep them warm while it’s keeping the inside of the motorhome warm. OK. Here is the part I don’t know. Or didn’t know before last night. I didn’t know whether both furnaces heat the storage compartments and holding tanks, or just one did. I guessed one heater was enough. I was wrong. We carry a finite amount of propane. When we’re plugged in, we have an unlimited amount of electricity. I chose to let the electric heater take care of the front of the motorhome last night, and turned the front furnace way down. I set the rear furnace to keep the bedroom and compartments warm. The inside of the motorhome stayed just like I wanted. The water pipes in the cabinets underneath froze.
We turned off the electric heater. We turned up the furnaces. We were still frozen. We waited. We turned on the hot water heater. It was still ten degrees outside. Nothing helped. We left the furnaces turned up, and drove off down the road, north into temperatures continuing in the teens. We turned left on Interstate 25, and drove across a couple temperature gradients. At two o’clock in the afternoon and fifty degrees outside, we got water. Finally, everything thawed. It’s going to be ten degrees again tonight. We’ll turn the electric heater off and leave both furnaces on. No way we could have any more trouble, given all we know now.
When you drive a car, or a small motorhome, it doesn’t matter where you stop for gas. With a larger motorhome, it gets more difficult to make everything line up properly at the gas pump. When you have a larger motorhome, and are towing, it gets critical. You can’t afford to get into a situation where you have to back up to get out. The towing mechanism is designed to pull. It is not designed to back up. So what is the logical next step? You go to truck stops. Right? Bigger things go to bigger places. It’s odd, though. We go to truck stops to get more room, and we don’t necessarily get more room. At truck stops, there are all these diesel pumps with all these trucks lined up, but they’re only for diesel trucks. There are gas islands, but they tend to look a lot like traditional gas stations. The pumps can be aligned so the patrons drive parallel to the convenience store, or they can be lined up perpendicular to the store, so a car can make the turn to get out, but anything larger is stuck. We don’t know why, but it seems like truck stops tend to have the perpendicular pump alignment least favorable to us. Flying J truck stops have a separate island for RVs to fill up, but we often find them cluttered up with RVs, diesel pickup trucks, and boats. And it’s not pay-at-the-pump at the RV island. We find that even though we’re driving something the size of a truck, we’re better off cruising gas stations looking for the proper pump alignment rather than just stopping at a place designed for trucks.
When we’re hooked up, and we’re in a dry climate, we tend to run a humidifier at night. It doesn’t take much to change this small dry space into something more humid. When we get up the next morning, the windows tend to be pretty foggy. We have to let the defroster run for awhile before we can see. When it’s really cold out, we have wonderful ice patterns all over the window insides. No problem. We start the motor and let the defroster run before we drive. No problem until we got to the toll booth for the Kansas Turnpike. I rolled up, unlatched the slide window next to me, and found it frozen shut. I struggled with it briefly, then Judy threw Annie off her lap, went out the door, around to the toll booth, and picked up the ticket. That took care of it. At least until we had to hand over the ticket and pay our toll at the other end. So down the toll road we went, generator running, electric hairdryer right behind my head, Judy thawing out the window frame so we would be able to get off the toll road when it was time.
Russell Kansas. Post rock capitol of
Know how, every time you’re driving the freeway on a trip, you run into that one car that doesn’t want to drive faster than you, it just wants to drive in front of you? You’re on cruise control and you catch them, so you pass them. Next thing you know, they’re passing you back. Inevitably, continuing at the same speed, you catch and pass them again and again. Somewhere, in a long trip, it always happens. Except this trip. Not once have we leapfrogged with a car or truck.
Stopped at a private park we’ve been to before in Stratton
Four hundred miles plus.
Tomorrow. Home.
